When a mother reports her child as having been abducted by a man and a woman masquerading as social workers, Banks is drawn into a strange and unsettling search for the missing boy.

Banks and his team now have a murder inquiry on their hands, as the body found on the moors is identified as 11-year-old Andre Petri.

Following the death of a journalist, Banks and his team discover connections to a suspicious death in 1980s involving the surviving members of a pop band.

A terrible chain of events is set in motion when an old neighbor of Banks' finds a loaded gun in her daughter's bedroom.